rewind

Automatically restart a Node application when dependencies change.

Installation

Install with npm:

npm install -g rewind

Getting Started

Start your application with rewind instead of node:

rewind server.js 3000

This will load server.js as the main module. Any changes to server.js or its dependencies will cause the server to restart.

If you application caches non-module assets, use the -w option to instruct rewind to watch them. For example:

rewind -w ./static -w ./templates server.js 3000

Rewind will scan these files or folders recursively. If any file is modified, the application with be restarted.

How it Works

Rewind forks a subprocess to run the real application. The subprocess detects loaded modules and reports them to the parent, which is monitoring the filesystem using fs.watch(). If any dependency changes, the subprocess is terminated with a SIGHUP and forked again.

If the subprocess dies (exits non-zero), rewind waits until one on the monitored files is changed. If the subprocess terminatss normally (exits zero), rewind stops monitoring files and exits as well.